For anyone who spent the weekend suffering through incoherent audience questions at Fan Expo, Bruce Campbell’s Q&A on Sunday was a breath of fresh air. Mercilessly ridiculing just about every fan that chimed in, the Evil Dead star made it clear that his real gift is for comedy. When one fan mentioned his acting aspirations, Campbell made him get on stage and perform a monologue from Death of a Salesman.

When another aspiring actor asked for stories about breaking into the business, Campbell scolded him for failing to read his first book, If Chins Could Kill. When the fan requested an anecdote that’s not in the book, Campbell earned big laughs with his usual comic intolerance. “Meaning I didn’t use all the best stories, and I took some special ones out for Q&As at Fan Expo? No, sir, everything I care to tell anybody is in this book. If I didn’t put it in this book, it’s none of your f**king business.”

Given Campbell’s undeniable comic talent, another fan asked why he started his career in horror, not comedy. “We knew we could do it cheap,” he said. “We had only done silly comedies before that, in high school. Everything was very Three Stoogey, but we were very intimidated. We wanted to make a feature film. If you do a comedy, you might need Robin Williams or Steve Martin or somebody like that. They would be expensive, but you can make a horror movie with nobody in it. Even to this day, first-time filmmakers just make a cheese-ball horror movie with nobody in it. You can do it because Texas Chain Saw Massacre was a bunch of nobodies. Evil Dead was a bunch of nobodies. They’re all a bunch of nobodies, so that’s what lead us into that.”

The Three Stooges influence returned with a vengeance in Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness. While most fans embraced this new emphasis on comedy, there is still a great deal of confusion about the ways these movies connect on a plot level. As Campbell sees it, there’s a simple way to find clarity. “If you cut all the recaps off from those movies, it would make a lot of sense,” he argued. “We only shot the recaps because each movie was made by a different company. We couldn’t get the rights to our own footage.”

When not mocking his fans or reminiscing about the Evil Dead movies, Campbell managed to offer some trashy life advice, specifically when he was asked to name his favourite line from Army of Darkness. “One that I know has power: ‘Give me some sugar, baby.’ I know this for a fact, sir—that it works. Normally I would not encourage a pick-up line because I feel you should be you at all times. Otherwise, you’ll be found out. But a fella came up at a signing and said, ‘Bruce, thank you for ‘give me some sugar, baby.’’ I said, ‘Why would you say that, sir?’ He goes, ‘Well, I was working in China, and I had that translated into Mandarin and I went into a bar in Beijing and used it on a Chinese chick.’ And he got laid, sir.”

Realizing that the fan asking this question was visibly underage, Campbell offered some additional explanation: “If you’re not there yet, that means they had sex.”